Purpose
This compilation documents how a heterogeneous set of clinicians, underground therapists, retreat centres, religious and ceremonial communities, peer-led networks, community-health projects, researchers, and participants have used psychoactive substances in attempts to address persistent psychological, behavioural, relational, addictive, and existential problems.
The corpus was assembled through three research passes. It includes the original practice-centre search, a second pass deliberately seeking lower-visibility practitioners and organisations, a third historical and under-indexed search, auxiliary and comparison cases, informal participant material, and candidates retained specifically to document overlap or failed verification. The evidence ledger was frozen before cross-source pattern synthesis so that later interpretations can be traced back to identifiable sources rather than to earlier summaries of them. [1]
The compilation therefore asks a narrower question than either “Do psychedelics work?” or “What is psychedelic therapy?” Its concern is descriptive first: what kinds of problems were people trying to address, what forms did their work take, who was doing it, and in what historical or institutional setting?
It deliberately includes settings that would not all have described themselves as “psychedelic therapy.” The corpus contains formal psychiatric and clinical research programmes, underground psychotherapy, Amazonian plant-medicine centres, Santo Daime healing communities, Bwiti-labelled iboga programmes, peer-led ibogaine networks, conventional psychiatric practices using ketamine, Indigenous and intercultural mental-health projects, and first-person experience archives. [2] [3] [4]
The phrase “deeply rooted problems” is used here as a compilation-level convenience rather than as a diagnosis. It encompasses problems that the sources themselves described using different vocabularies at different times: alcohol or heroin dependence, “toxicomanias,” chemical dependence, PTSD, complex trauma, depression, treatment-resistant psychiatric conditions, childhood abuse, fear, shame, mistrust, relational difficulties, psychospiritual crisis, and cases in which ordinary psychotherapy had become “stuck.” [3] [5] [6] [7]
This is not a treatment manual, a ranking of providers, or evidence that all practices represented here are effective. An institution's own description establishes what it says it does, not whether the intervention causes recovery; participant accounts establish reported experience, not causation. Multiple pages belonging to the same practitioner or institution are treated as one source family, and direct borrowing or shared training is recorded so that one lineage cannot later appear to be several independent discoveries. [1]
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